ABSTRACT
A Il poets speak the same symbolic language, but they have to learn .fi. it either by instinct or unconsciously from other poets. In the poetry of the Western world from medieval times to our own, there has been a framework for poetic symbolism with four main levels. On the top level is what I should call the Logos vision, which includes the conventional heaven of religion, the place of the presence of God. The central symbol of the Logos vision is the city, the Biblical New J erusalem, but it is also often described in metaphors taken from mathematics or from music, the two areas being connected by the conception of 'harmony'. Central to Logos imagery, in all poetry before Newton's time at least, is the image of the orderly stars moving in spheres which also give out a harmonious music, the archetype of the music we hear. The Logos vision is that of an order of existence designed by an intelligent Creator, and among its musical and mathematical images is that of the dance, which appears in Dante, in Sir John Davies's Orchestra, in the Eliot Quartets, and at the end of 'Among School Children'. In the last poem the image of the chestnut tree, immediately preceding, recalls the traditional image of the earthly paradise, just below the circling stars, in which man was originally placed.
